LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.
Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.
Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the Rust-based terminal that grew up into an agentic development environment. A former Google principal engineer who led the Docs and Sheets teams, he looked at the one tool every programmer touches and noticed it had barely changed in 40 years. Warp's answer: a command line that reads natural language, runs AI agents, and as of 2025 codes by prompt. The company has raised roughly $73-75M from Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field and Elad Gil, and went from its first $1M of ARR in 300-plus days to adding $1M every few days.
John Sundell is a Swift and Rust developer, writer and podcaster who runs Swift by Sundell, a weekly publication of articles, tips, podcasts and videos read in well over a hundred countries. A former lead iOS developer at Spotify, he went indie to build apps, games and a stack of widely used open-source developer tools - including the static site generator Publish, the type-safe HTML DSL Plot, the Markdown parser Ink and the syntax highlighter Splash. He is based in Gdansk, Poland.
Mozilla builds Firefox and a family of privacy-first internet products with a single, stubborn goal: keep the web open, private, and not owned by anyone. Spun out of Netscape in 1998 and run by a for-profit corporation wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla competes with the largest companies on earth while answering to a mission instead of shareholders.
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, an AI chip startup based in Mountain View, California, designing purpose-built silicon for large language models. A former Google Senior Staff Software Engineer who led AI software development for Google's TPUs and served as Efficiency Lead for PaLM, Pope left Google one week before ChatGPT launched to build what he calls 'the best chips for LLMs that physics allows.' MatX has raised approximately $604M to date, including a $500M Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP, and is building a hybrid SRAM-HBM chip architecture targeting the world's leading AI labs.
Ian Glow is the co-founder and CEO of Zeromatter, a Mountain View-based simulation platform that lets robotics, aerospace, and autonomy teams build, test, and train anything in virtual environments. He previously helped pioneer Tesla's Autopilot simulation infrastructure - working as Manager of Autopilot Simulation - before striking out to democratize simulation tooling for the broader industry. Zeromatter has raised $45M and assembled a 75+ person team of engineers from Tesla, Cruise, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Activision, and id Software.
Uma Roy is the co-founder and CEO of Succinct, the company building SP1 - the world's fastest open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). A former Google Brain AI researcher and MIT double major in mathematics and computer science, she pivoted from machine learning to cryptography to make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to every developer. Under her leadership, Succinct raised $55M led by Paradigm, launched a decentralized prover network, and positioned SP1 as critical infrastructure securing billions in TVL across major Layer 2 networks.
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Andy Grove is the original creator of Apache DataFusion and a PMC member of Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion. With over 30 years of software engineering experience, he specializes in query engines and distributed systems, currently serving as Principal Distributed Database Engineer at Apple. He's the author of 'How Query Engines Work' and creator of sqlparser-rs, one of the leading open-source SQL parsers for Rust. His open-source contributions have shaped the modern data processing ecosystem, with DataFusion powering hundreds of data-centric applications worldwide.
Zelos Cloud is a San Francisco-based B2B data platform for mission-critical systems, founded in 2023 by three former Tesla and Neuralink engineers. The platform unifies data collection, remote command-and-control, real-time visualization, and automated testing for firmware and industrial systems - solving the tooling chaos that plagues teams building hardware that cannot afford to fail. Backed by Y Combinator (S23) and Human Capital, Zelos Cloud is building the operating layer that firmware and embedded systems engineers have always needed but never had.
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.
Amos Wenger, known online as 'fasterthanlime', is a Swiss software engineer, open-source author, and technical educator based in Lyon, France. Through their blog, newsletter, videos, and the Self-Directed Research Podcast (co-hosted with James Munns), Amos has become one of the most beloved voices in the Rust programming community - known for long-form, deeply exploratory articles that make the inner workings of computers approachable and fascinating. Founder of the open-source organization bearcove, Amos builds real tools like fluke (HTTP/2 over io_uring), facet (Rust reflection), and rc-zip while funding this work through sponsorships and content creation.
Jon Gjengset is a principal engineer at Helsing, Rust systems programming educator, and author of 'Rust for Rustaceans' (No Starch Press). He holds a PhD from MIT CSAIL where he built Noria, a streaming dataflow database system offering up to 20x performance improvements. A prolific live-coder and YouTube educator since 2018, Jon co-founded ReadySet (a $29M-funded database startup), contributed to the Rust ecosystem, and teaches at MIT's Missing Semester. Based in Oslo, Norway, he is one of the most respected voices in the Rust community.
Kris Nóva (1987-2023) was a principal engineer at GitHub, co-founder of The Nivenly Foundation, author, alpinist, and transgender activist who shaped the cloud-native infrastructure world. Best known for creating kubicorn, the Aurae runtime, and co-authoring Cloud Native Infrastructure with O'Reilly, she lived a life of radical generosity - growing Hachyderm from 700 to 40,000 users, founding the Privilege Escalation Foundation to support gender minorities in STEM, and writing Hacking Capitalism to help marginalized technologists navigate an industry that had once left her unhoused. She died on August 16, 2023, in a climbing accident in Seattle.
Predrag Gruevski is an independent software engineer, open-source creator, and Rust ecosystem luminary best known for building Trustfall - a universal query engine that lets you query anything from APIs to LLMs - and cargo-semver-checks, a semantic versioning linter that's becoming a cornerstone of the Rust publish workflow. A former MIT competitive mathematician turned principal engineer at Kensho Technologies, Predrag brings Olympic-level rigor to API design and compiler technology, writing and speaking extensively on correctness-first software development.
Sylvain Kerkour is a French software engineer, security researcher, and author best known for 'Black Hat Rust' - a hands-on book applying offensive security techniques with the Rust programming language. Self-described as a 'professional troublemaker', he writes about programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship at kerkour.com under the tagline '(Ab)using technology for fun & profit'. He is a vocal advocate for supply chain security in the Rust ecosystem and creator of the Bloom open-technology platform and the ChaCha20-BLAKE3 AEAD cipher implementation.
Xe Iaso is a technical educator, open source founder, conference speaker, Twitch streamer, and VTuber based in Ottawa, Canada. The CEO of Techaro and creator of Anubis - the open-source anti-AI-scraper tool now protecting GNOME, FFmpeg, Linux kernel archives, and UNESCO - Xe built a cult following of 400+ blog posts that mix deep systems engineering with irreverent philosophy. Known for pioneering developer relations teams at Tailscale and Fly.io, and for coining their own title 'Archmage of Infrastructure,' Xe is the rare technologist who turned shitposting into a career strategy and made it work.